Thursday, June 27th 2024
Visual artist, photographer and art director. It’s easy to categorize Neil Krug’s work but it’s not easy to pin him down. This L.A. based artist has been working with top names in the music industry since 2010, with acts like Tame Impala and Lana Del Rey amongst his portfolio, as his work creating beautiful album covers remains as some of his most distinctive, signature pieces.
But no, you’re not going to catch him name-dropping anytime soon as he doesn’t think of his careers in terms of highlights, he focuses on the memories and the emotions attached to them for inspiration: “I never think about my career in terms of highlights; I just think of the memories of being with friends in different places and I feel a sweet romance with those moments. Right now, to finish any piece of work that I’m proud of and to have people experience it is pretty exciting. In general, it feels as though social media is inundating the world with sensory overload. It’s as if we’re living in the age of the “reactionary” art form. I think this form (whatever you want to call it) will in time prove to have overwhelming diminishing returns”.
When talking about what inspires him, he easily selects music, sex, rainy streets and driving in the desert at night as his main muses. When it comes to depicting his influences, Krug said in an interview for Ninu Nina: “From an early age until now, my influences have been all over the place. I was thinking about this the other day in a hyper-recall-daze and the earliest inspirations that I can remember were probably the Marvel logos after Saturday morning cartoons in the 1980s–– which now could be seen as some kind of vaporwave art piece. I immediately felt connected to that aesthetic as a kid. The same can be said for the Sesame Street animations and blips that played on PBS throughout the ‘80s. The funky music, animation, and the overall sensibility of that show spoke to me in so many ways”.
What really brought attention to Neil’s work is his collaboration with Lana Del Rey, who met in 2014 thanks to the fact that Lana was a fan of Krug’s ‘Pulp Art Book’ photography book published in 2010, which consisted in a fashionable compilation of vintage-looking polaroids of his then girlfriend, model Joni Harbeck. The aesthetic presented in the books matched Del Rey’s style and the two of them soon started shooting images for her third long-length album ‘Ultraviolence’. Their latest collaboration can be seen in Lana’s ‘Did You Know That There’s a Tunnel Under Ocean Blvd’ album cover, the ninth of her career.
As for his creative process, Krug says that he tries to “absorb the things that speak to me and challenge my sensibilities. Then I try to create a situation where I’ll be able to make the work—and finish it—with a bit of the same energy that I had when I started. Sometimes it’s sounds I hear that’ll inform an image I see in my head. And if that image or scene feels exciting, I’ll often write it down in some kind of scribbled code that only I could decipher. I keep tons of these little notes around my studio, which is helpful when I need to make something quickly; I’m already queued up… Some ideas form over long periods of time. When they’re ready to be blasted out, I’ll usually have the feeling that there’s nowhere left to go but out”.
Neil definitely takes good pictures, but for him, what makes a great photo is subjective: “I suppose the only criteria is if the work communicates an idea well regardless of how sloppy the presentation may be. It’s all subjective so my opinion means nothing to the person reading this”.
And yes, this can be applied to any piece of art, design, or media that you consume – keep that in mind.
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